Vex Thal Ink missing??

I just wanted to follow up on this thread to say that after testing it myself, and looping in QA... we cannot reproduce this issue. I checked the scripts, I checked the numbers, it is absolutely set to 35% drop chance. The script has no issues in it. I tried the quest a few times and had the item drop consistently within 1-3 kills. To address Piemastaj's theory, my dear QA friend Truenorth tried it with two characters in a group, one of which already had the item. There was still no issue getting the ink to drop for the second character. It took minutes, not even an hour.
I have a sticky note on my monitor about this because it's weighing on my mind, haha. I'll keep noodling about it, but I'm sorry - at the moment I can't confirm that this is an issue It's not that I don't believe y'all, I just haven't been able to break it myself yet.

(I've tried it by killing the different Va Liako, Liako, and/or Senshali Akheva and they've all seemed to work).

Had no problems with this on AB this week.

4 chars doing quest, ink and paper alternated between kills. Each looted up as soon as the items were dropped.

We had 4 real players and two mercs doing this quest two nights ago. We had the same issue. We killed for over two hours to complete it, killed 42 mobs (had parser on so just checked it). We moved all over to get it to drop since we did it on our mains the month before an was super fast.

Are you testing it on your perfect, no-lag, pristine internal testing server, or are you testing it on a real server?

Are you 100% sure you even need the task for them to drop? Could have swore ive had them drop just messing around by myself and merc - could be mis remembering. I dont think it matters how many in the group have task, it didnt seem like those types of tasks, like the ToFs ones.

Most of the items needed for partisan only drop if a person in the group or a person on agro require the drop. I ran into at least one where we killed 20 or 30 mobs with not one drop. This was for an alt who was last on agro (5th or 6th on agro, and if pets count as on agro it could be 7th or 8th on agro). As an experiment we had the toon needing the drop pull and the item then dropped immediately. Could have been coincidence of course but if this is still happening, have the person need pull or get on agro as early as possible.

I grab the quest on as many people as I can in group. I kill in the circuit on the first floor as if you're going to go up a floor but just keep traveling in a circle killing any akhevians in my way. Seemingly all of them drop the things I need for the quest, and having the quest on lots more people seems to increase drop rate vs just doing it for one person. I never have mercs in group.

Kill in the circular path on first floor, all akhevians and see if you can get your drops there.

I looked even harder, I consulted more people, and I think the above is indeed the answer. The ink is dropping at a 35% rate currently. Additionally, of all the Akheva in the zone, there are 74 possible spots where the correct type of Akheva spawn (which felt very reasonable to me). But I see now that there are only 4 spots that are 100% guaranteed to spawn the type of Akheva that'll drop the ink, and there are a lot of different type of Akheva. So, it is indeed very feasible that clearing out the floor will result in very few of the dudes who can drop this ink from spawning.

All to say, thank you for sharing your experiences! This was a learning experience and I will be more thoughtful about these types of things going forward. To rectify the issue, I'll be increasing the drop rate of both the ink and paper to 50%. Additionally, I will be changing some of the Akheva to be a 100% guaranteed spawn of the ink-dropping mobs. I'm doing a once over to make sure that there are roughly equal amounts of ink-dropping and paper-dropping Akheva.

As an aside, how do you think Akheva write? Do they use the top set of arms, or bottom? Both?

this is totally unrelated to the post but i audibly laughed here sitting at my computer

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one who has trouble linking pictures sometimes.

The last one would have come in handy writing lines at school.....not that I got lines at school. /cough